Wood Sprites

Zahara settled on the stair just below her. “It’s not like a mask. It’s like a bracelet.” She slid off her thick gold band and twirled it so it caught the light. “This is beautiful as a piece of art. My arm is beautiful as part of my body.” She held up her arm, slim and graceful, as dark chocolate as the tortoiseshell. “Gold does not make you beautiful. Your arm does not make gold beautiful.” She slid on the bracelet and twisted her hand to show off the band in all its golden wonder against her warm darkness. “The two come together in a celebration of beauty. We exist. We are. One does not detract from the other. So you cannot claim that they add to each other.”

“But they do add to each other. I don’t think that would be nearly as pretty on Elle.”

Zahara giggled, and her quiet smile broke into something younger and joyous. “Everyone has been talking about your videos all week, but I don’t think anyone has been talking to you.”

“No, they’ve been just staring.” If the twins hadn’t been so wrapped up with decoding the spell book and finding a method for generating magic, it would have been very upsetting. As it was, it was embarrassing and annoying.

“My mom is a model; she’s really famous. She meets all these amazingly talented people, and they all act like it’s a big deal to talk with her. But really, she’s a normal mom that gets up in the morning hoping that there’s enough milk for everyone’s cereal and nobody overflows the toilet before she has to go to work.”

It so wasn’t where Louise thought the conversation was going that she laughed. “Your toilet overflows a lot?”

“Constantly. It’s an old building, and my little brother is an idiot with toilet paper. When you meet enough ‘famous’ people, you start to realize that at the core, everyone is the same.”

“So — you’re not impressed with us being Lemon-Lime JEl-Lo?”

Zahara giggled. “I am impressed! I could fangirl all over you about how funny your videos are, how amazing the costumes are, how beautiful the sets are and everything. According to my mom, though, having someone suddenly gush all over you is a little creepy.”

“Yeah, it is. A little.”

“Is that why you’ve kept such a low profile? Every time you’d release a video, people would start trying to guess who you are.”

Louise shook her head. “We just thought our lives wouldn’t be interesting to anyone. We just go to school.” And school was so boring that they made up games like pretending not to know French in order to make it bearable. After several attempts to write up biographies, including one that ironically claimed that they were elves living in secret in New York City, they’d decided to leave off all information about themselves.

“Most people think you must live in Pittsburgh because everything is so detailed and accurate. Also because you always post your new video during Shutdown.”

It was a little bit creepy that people had figured out their posting schedule. Since the date floated, they didn’t think anyone would make a connection. “We make a lot up.”

“There’s scientists saying that you’re getting most of it right. How do you know everything that you don’t make up?”

Real scientists had seen their videos? Did any of them recognize themselves? “Remember the paper we had to do in first grade about Elfhome? While we were doing research for it, we ran across this funny article.”

Their classmates had been happy to regurgitate commonly known facts like how Elfhome was a mirror Earth in a parallel universe complete with identical continents. The twins, however, realized that there was too little known about the elves themselves. It was easier to find out information on ancient kings of Babylon on Earth than the current royal court on Elfhome. Even though there were big communities of scientists in Pittsburgh, there was nothing publicly available about their findings. Obviously the information was being hidden someplace. The twins rose to the challenge and started to hack university e-mails, looking for clues to what the scientists were doing with the data they were collecting.

What they found was ripe for parody.

Apparently elves knew that the humans would view them as lab rats. There was an entire section of the treaty forbidding the collection of genetic material from elves. It went so far as to specifying “stray DNA” of dandruff, fingernail cuttings, and stray hairs. Because the elves were immortal, most questions about ancient history were viewed as personal and rude. While the enclaves had public areas open to the humans, a bulk of the compounds were deemed private and off-limits to close study. The elves were also reluctant to talk about private issues to anyone outside of their household.

It forced researchers to become super-secret spy scientists that the twins parodied by making them ninjas in their videos. In every scene, they had one or more ninja anthropologists, sometimes well hidden, sometimes badly. It made every video an Easter egg hunt for scientists.